Kathleen Maher

Netflix announces the Post Technology Alliance

Netflix has been extremely influential this year with its spending on content and on marketing its content. (See Report from Telluride.) At IBC in September 2018, the company has also announced its Netflix Post Technology Alliance for tools providers.  The company has nailed down its requirements for content in several areas including animation, audio, color grading, etc. Content creators will … Read more

Adobe takes Premiere and After Effects into new territory

In honor of IBC, Adobe updated its video tools new features and long-awaited fixes. In addition, Adobe introduced new mobile tools called Project Rush. This latest update pushes Adobe’s video tools into new territory and gives it more power for finishing as well as animation and immersive content.  As the film and video industry move into awards season, Adobe is … Read more

Report from Telluride

The Telluride film festival is a rarified festival. It’s a place physically hard to get to. Likewise, the festival organizers pride themselves on presenting movies that require a little extra work on the part of the audience. Not that every movie is tough, but if a festival goer isn’t careful, it’s pretty easy to wind up staring at the ceiling … Read more

Chaos Group demos Project Lavina; realtime ray tracing

Forest animation rendered in realtime with Chaos’ new Lavina technology. The scene has over 300 billion triangles and 80,000 instances running at 24–30 frames per second with no rasterized graphics or reduced level of detail as might be used for game engine rendering. In this case, the render was performed on Nvidia’s Quadro RTX GPUs.  Chaos Group showcased its new … Read more

Robots to go, courtesy of Ai Build

Ai Build is a company that has managed to combine all the hot-button technologies of manufacturing into one product package—the Ai Build Factory as a Service (FaaS). It’s AI+large scale 3D printing+IoT.  Unveiled at the Victoria and Albert Museum during Digital Design Weekend 2018, Ai Build’s new package gives manufacturers the ability to license their automated fabrication product for on-prem … Read more

AMD brings Threadripper and new Vega boards to IBC for rendering, VFX, and video

At IBC, digitalization is a done deal and 4K becoming the norm; 8K is coming in with new screens, cameras, transmission systems, CODECS, and lenses all built to satisfy increasing demand. UHD is at home in living rooms around the world and the discussion now is around HDR. All of that adds of the heavy workloads for workstations and servers, … Read more

Siemens acquires longtime visualization partner Lightwork Design

Siemens has announced the acquisition of Lightwork Design of Sheffield, England. Lightwork began life as an OEM provider of rendering software to many CAD companies including Autodesk, PTC, Siemens, and Dassault at one time or another. The company did not make products that sold directly to customers. Lightwork Design supplied rendering technology to Siemens for over twenty years. The company … Read more

Ryff brings dynamic product placement to OTT video streaming

Take a little bit of AI, mix it with 3D technology, add marketing advertising experience and you might come up with something like Ryff, a new company with the ability to seamlessly add products in video content after the content has been published. Ryff is built around its new technology called Placer. Using Placer, content can be placed dynamically, and … Read more

Cinema 4D 20 arrives

Maxon introduced Cinema 4D release 20 at Siggraph this year and rolled out the new software weeks later. They’ve got that stable cadence down, as befits a German company, though the company has a strong North American presence as well since the US is Cinema 4D’s largest user base. Maxon is a 3D modeling and animation tool with a strong … Read more

Maxon gets new CEO

Maxon’s parent company Nemetschek has always been an interesting company, more a group of independent companies with a layer of infrastructure on top to provide some management and bookkeeping. The structure has served the company well since its founding in 1986. The individual companies were motivated to excel on their own. But, in some instances, it seemed the company wasn’t … Read more

Allegorithmic showcases new tools, new partnerships, new markets at Siggraph 2018

Allegorithmic has been throwing itself parties all around the world to show off its capabilities, to teach users new tricks, and to preview upcoming software. Allegorithmic, with the help of industry partners, is defining new territory for content creation.  Fun with procedural textures: all of these images are made of textures on simple shapes by people with too much time … Read more